The Democrats and the Zombie Horde

I’m not gushing with praise about President Trump’s big speech on February 28, but one of his actions on March 1 does make me gush a little. I chose that verb with cunning: it alludes to his signing of an executive order striking down President Obama’s “Waters of the United States” rule, which gave the EPA the authority to harass people who try to do almost anything about the water on their land, even if the water is nothing but ponds or “vernal pools” (i.e., puddles that show up when it rains). And when I say “harass” I mean harass. The EPA has tried to make malefactors pay tens of thousands of dollars a day in fines.

I usually don’t like to talk about social classes, because the Marxists made such a mess of that, but the rule that Trump wants to get rid of is class legislation of a familiar but very pernicious kind. It’s like all the rules that Democrats have made forbidding you from getting the lightbulb you want or building a house near the suspected hive of some rare insect or drilling for oil in some area that no one ever visits but some environmentalist organization has located on a map and now derives financial support for “caring about.” Such rules — such under-the-table legislation — are meant to help well-off people who live in cities have good feelings or to help their kids get jobs “advocating for the environment,” at the expense of people who work with their hands on farms or oil rigs, or who simply want to maintain a decent environment for themselves. This is legislation that takes wealth (whether money or psychic benefits) out of the control of one group and gives it into the control of another group, which is ignored or ridiculed if it protests.

While he talked, the people in the background sat immobile, staring into space, not daring to move a muscle.

The Democratic Party is the main (not the sole, but the main) engine of class warfare in America, and its view of the exploited class — i.e., the broad mass of people who are hurt by its policies, but have to pay for them — has never been indicated so clearly as it was by the Democrats’ response to Trump’s oration. The Democratic leadership has identified what it thinks is the cause of all its problem: older, white, working-class people who live in that strange, virtually unknown region west of the Hudson and east of Hollywood. So it arranged for a retired Democrat governor from Kentucky, who looks about 180 years old, to sit in a diner in his home state, backed by other white people, mainly old, and talk in a strong Southern accent about himself, his religious connections, and his identification with po’ people and the workin’ class. While he talked, the people in the background sat immobile, staring into space, not daring to move a muscle. This, in the professional Democrats’ view, is the Other that must be tricked into continued subservience to us — the Other that can best be tricked by images of itself as a collection of zombies.

Yes, come to think of it, I do believe that Marx might have had something interesting to say about this.

About this Author

Stephen Cox is editor of Liberty, and a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego. His recent books include The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison and American Christianity: The Continuing Revolution. Newly published is Culture and Liberty, a selection of works by Isabel Paterson.